In January 2016, there were 118,907 vehicles registered with the DC DMV at 89,871 residential addresses, according to data provided in a recent FOIA request.
Keep in mind that this does not include any vehicles that residents are using that they have not registered with the DC DMV. This also doesn’t include non-residential vehicles.
The DC DMV website says there are 310,000 total vehicles registered in DC.
If we just add up the number of 9’x18’ parking spaces required for all these 310,000 vehicles, we get a total area of 1.8 square miles (162 sqft * 310,000 vehicles * 3.58701e-8 sqmi/sqft). If you parked all of these cars bumper to bumper, they would cover Capitol Hill.
Here is the breakdown of how many households owned one, versus, two, versus 3 vehicles, etc:
And here is that same breakdown in percentage terms:
According to this FOIA’d data, here is the number of cars registered in each ANC Single Member District (SMD):
Here is the number of vehicles registered as a percentage of the number of households in the tract in 2020.
We can also correlate median household income in each tract in the 2019-2023 5-year American Community Survey with our “# vehicles / # households” statistic. When we do this, we find that every $25,000 increase in tract median income is associated with an increase of 7 additional cars per household.
There are 43,919 registered cars within 800 meters of a metro station in DC according to this data set. That is 37% of the total number of vehicles.